How do the deep-rooted legacies of medical racism, experimentation, and reproductive injustice continue to materialize in Philadelphia, the birthplace of American obstetrics?
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What grassroots care models and activist traditions have communities developed to resist and heal from this slow violence, and what situated knowledges emerge from their embodied practices? 
​How might centering the stories and expertise of birthworkers, organizers, and survivors help us imagine and enact more liberatory reproductive futures?
Reckoning and Repair Season 3 explores these questions through immersive oral histories and multimedia figurations that engage with reproductive justice in Philly, most broadly construed. This season was recorded, written, and produced as part of the "Reproduction, Justice, and Care: Listening in Philly" course co-taught by Dr. Alissa Jordan and Dr. Daniela Brissett at the University of Pennsylvania.
Voices of Defiance: Black Women’s Resistance to the Philadelphia Welfare System with Kayla Simpson
Seeking Reproductive Justice in school spaces an oral history with Dr. Tawanna Jones by Avalon Hinchman
The History and Future of Black Breastfeeding in Philadelphia with Claire Lorenzetti
Visualizing Care with Jean Jin
Black Girls in Colour with We Reign and Latoya Briscoe
Birth and bodily empowerment an oral history with doula Jasha Buckery by Mae Nagel
The Gift of Family with Joel Austin and Maryam Jamal
 Anandibai Joshee’s Thesis: The First Feminist Medical Ethnography? with Mariam Rizvi
Fat Accessibility: A Penn and Philly-based Autoethnographic Photo Essay with Laura-Joelle Geschwindt 
Reconstructing Cultures of Birth Through the Lense of Nurse-Midwifery a conversation with Sarah Logan and Catherine Ellis
Vote for Black Girls an oral history with Daniela Brissett and Hazel Ekeke 
Youth and Mental Health with Dr. Lydia Sit & Hazel Ekeke
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Team

Latoya Briscoe

Daniela Brissett

Laura-Joelle Geschwindt

Avalon Hinchman

Alissa Jordan

Claire Lorenzetti

Kayla Simpson

Sydney Wiggins

Hazel Ekeke

Catherine Ellis

Maryam (MJ) Jamal

Jean Jin

Mae Nagel

Mariam Rizvi

Center for Experimental Ethnography

The Center for Experimental Ethnography was founded in 2018 to promote multi-modal research practices as both method and theory, integral dimensions of scholarly research.  Directed by Deborah A. Thomas (John L. Jackson, Jr., Co-Director), we are a group of faculty across eight of Penn’s twelve schools who facilitate and support multi-modal research practices among undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, and our partners within the City of Philadelphia and beyond.  We coordinate scholarship, research, and public partnerships related to multi-modal work practices; consolidate those activities in which we (and our students) are already engaged; and grow these generative connections by hosting Visiting Scholars, coordinating workshops and conferences, supporting multi-modal project based courses, facilitating visual, sonic, and performative undergraduate and graduate research projects, producing rigorous criteria for assessing those projects, engaging with arts and community-based institutions throughout Philadelphia, and forging connections with other like-minded institutions worldwide.  We see creative practice as intellectual work that necessarily historicizes the inequalities that pervade our society, and that develops solutions for their present iterations through collaborative and participatory practice.  We believe that multi-modal research practices transform how we conduct research, how we generate and disseminate knowledge, how we train students, and how we remain accountable to the communities in which we interact and through which our research circulates.  
     

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Photo Credits:
​PAFA. César Sánchez, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons